Research into Provenance

The myGrid team have a long history of research and collaboration into the modelling and capture of provenance-related information about workflows, services and data.  The aim is to answer challenges such as:

• Find the process that led to this set of data
• Find and explain the differences between these runs of the same workflow
• Find the last time I ran a workflow that contained this service

Previously Jun Zhao and Daniele Turi carried out the research and participated in many provenance-related events.  These included the highly successful participation of the myGrid team in the Provenance Challenges.
The myGrid team’s work included the production of the logbook plugin that allows the capture of provenance from runs of Taverna workflows based upon the provenance ontology.

The recent provenance work has been carried on, primarily by Paolo Missier. A model of provenance has been produced and software written to allow its population from runs of Taverna 2. This new model increases Taverna’s capability to capture information and answer complex provenance queries.
Paolo is also working on an Eli Lilly funded project dealing with provenance information.